Unveiling Argo Project Updates with Lisa-Marie Namphy and Katie Lamkin-Fulsher – KubeCon Europe 2025

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here at CubeCon.

You know, you can never have enough Argo if you were watching, it's in chronological order today. You know, two or three interviews ago, read some folks, uh, from the Argo project talking about Argo CD three O. Big new release, first new release in four years.

What the heck? Who thought of that in an open source project? But anyway, I wanna continue talking about Argo.

Well, well number one, because my friend Lisa here is, is affiliated with them, and I love having her on, but I just said that to make her feel good. But really, no. I mean, it, it worked.

It worked. Um, but really, Argo's the third largest project in the CNCF catalog of over 200 projects. And so we should give it a little time.

We've spoke a, we've spoken a lot about Kubernetes, we've spoken a lot about Open Telemetry. Let's talk a lot about Argo, but we're not gonna spend a lot of time on Argo CD three Oh, we're gonna talk about some other aspects that are really cool about Argo that I want to share with you. First, let me introduce you to our group.

I've mentioned Lisa, who's really Lisa Marie. Nancy. Nancy.

But we're gonna call her Lisa, Katie Marie. We got two Maries. Go figure.

Katie Marie. Two last names together. Lambkin Fulcher, Lambkin Fulcher.

Both of these ladies are with Intuit, but more importantly, or as importantly, they're also key people in the Argo community. Katie, what, well, if you wanna talk about what you do at Intuit, feel free, but also what do you, what do you role is you have in the Argo community? Yeah, so my role in the Argo community is, I'm a member of the Marketing Sig, so SIG Marketing.

Um, and my role at Intuit is a product manager, a platform, and open source. And so Argo is really near and dear to my heart as I'm, I'm a background as an engineer. Um, I went from a regular software engineer, moved into architecture, managed engineering teams, and then made the switch into product management, specifically with, you know, technology and open source.

And it's been a really amazing switch because not only do I get to focus on, you know, really cool technology, but I'm solving the problems that I experienced as an individual contributor and a software engineer. So it's extremely rewarding. Very cool.

As the product manager become the marketing sick it No marketing thing. Yes. Yes, it Is.

I mean, you know, a part of product management is making sure that the product is well represented in the community, um, and making sure that the content that we put in front of people is going to be beneficial, uh, not only for users, but also contributors of the project as well. And I believe that's something that product managers should be able to take ownership of. Um, but not only with that sig it contributes in many other areas of the projects as well.

And one of the things that I do is work with closely with the maintainers on, uh, defining the roadmap of the project as well, and making sure that we include, uh, contributions from all the organizations and all the individual contributors around the world that contribute to Argo. I love it. Lisa, what about you?

Yeah, I joined Intuit about eight months ago, so I'm still pretty new to Intuit, but I came in through the open source and community side of things. So I've been kind of Argo adjacent from the open source community running many meetups with Argo in the early days, and also hosting some of them at Intuit with our large user group in the San Francisco Bay area. Um, so I've known the Argo community for a long time, um, and now I am, you know, super happy to have joined Intuit, I, you probably remember that Intuit won the end user of the year award twice here at CubeCon, largely for Argo, for contributing, for creating and contributing Argo to the CNCF.

And it's just really great to work for an end user company like that. My day job, Intuit is also running the developer relations team. So I have the tech learning team under me and onboarding all 8,000 of our developers and responsible for developer velocity, making 'em go faster, building all those great tools and AI trainings.

Um, also there's a, a product marketing and a developer advocacy function. So I get to do a lot of source, you know, OPO type of things in the team as well. And I get to work with absolutely amazing people like Katie and her team.

One small correction, the, um, this is the first major release for Argo for four years, but Argo has been doing lots of, Well, ads releases are done in the modern world. Yes, they're incremental, But this is a big one for sure. But this is the big major one.

Yeah, We were super happy to contribute a lot of things to it. 0. The most asked for feature was promotions, and we were really happy to be able to develop that and to contribute.

So if you wanna talk a little bit about our promotions, I'm just gonna ask all the questions here. If you don't I'm good. I, I'm, I'm questioned out, so go with it.

Yeah, I can definitely talk about Argo promotion. So one of the things that we've noticed, um, with some of the experiences that developers were having at Intuit were some challenge with our promotion process, right? Um, and that's not only something that's being experienced at Intuit, but as we can see for some of the trends that we've seen at Argo Con this year and at previous years, it's trends all across the industry.

People have done a really good job with the adoption of Argo CD today, of maturing their continuous delivery status, making sure that they can implement, get ops and, and have health statuses and deployments across all of their environments, has put them into a point where they're very mature in that sense. Right now, when you're looking at things holistically, when you start looking at the maturity of your orchestration across multiple environments and across multiple regions, you encounter some challenges with the way that a lot of people have been doing promotions today. Uh, an example would be, today a lot of pipelines are defined imperatively.

Um, you either define a pipeline using a Jenkins file, a you know, using Circle ci, uh, GitLab, um, and it's a straight, uh, you know, a series of steps defined in a file that, um, you know, releases, uh, different versions across your different environments. Um, unfortunately, when multiples releases are happening sequentially, right, as developer productivity improves, and as we want to release multiple times a day, we unfortunately can encounter issues. We need to be able to roll back successfully.

But if people are trying to push out multiple versions, multiple times a day, rollbacks happen, you can encounter multiple issues with them. And so we introduce, uh, GI Ops promoter, um, into the Argo Labs repo to help create a declarative way to orchestrate your promotions across multiple environments, but without the hassle of working with imperative pipelines. Excellent.

I hope the people out there got that right And now they can rewind and watch it again. Yeah. We can watch the beauty of, of recording it.

Um, what's the, what has the, uh, community's reaction been? The community's reaction's been very positive. Um, so far.

We have a minor release out thus far, and people are extremely engaged and focused on trying to solve these problems and making sure that they can solve the problems in the correct way. There are vendors that provide solutions, uh, paid for solutions that, um, are, you know, looking to, uh, incorporate some of the pillars that we've established in Goss Promoter and their solutions as well. Um, and I think, you know, that's great for the community and that's gonna be great for people solving those problems, but we wanna make sure that we can also solve them for the open source community.

So for those that are not tied to a vendor, don't wanna be tied to a vendor that, you know, we can solve those with the Argo project. Absolutely. You know, one of the more popular themes I'm hearing, talking to people here this year is, I don't wanna be locked in.

Now, it might have something to do with hypervisor company, the licensing changes, it might not, but the, the fact of the matter is, people have learned a lesson, I don't want to be locked in. And, and that used to be one of the big selling points of open source, right? You're not locked in, you can, you can take the software and develop it yourself like Intuit does, right?

You can contribute it back, you cannot contribute it back. You can, you know, your options are wide open. How important is that to it's massive stress, right?

And you, you know, that, I imagine that's a big reason why you guys, you know, are involved as you're involved in the open source Movement. Yeah, and it's not just Argo, we consume a lot of open source. Um, we, we really rely on it.

People don't really realize that QuickBooks and TurboTax runs on Kubernetes and Argo and, uh, these are American brands. So people here don't really care how your taxes are done in the United States. It's much easier here, I think.

But, um, It's a lot of things easier here. Don't get, sorry. But we really, and this is, this is why open source is so important.

You know, we, we created something that we really, really need. Obviously we want the, um, all the power of a very large community, as you said, the third largest in the C NCF F ecosystem. Um, all of those maintainers that come from other companies and our company, um, all of those contributors, those are very important to get the products to be where we need it to be.

We're gonna still stay very involved and contribute because we still rely on it. But if you don't open source, if something's super proprietary and you're just using proprietary software, you are at the mercy of that vendor when they're gonna make those changes. Maybe they're gonna make what you want, maybe they're not, you know, you might be in a queue, uh, it is just a lot harder.

Whereas this way with open source, you can actually influence and you can get the features that you need in the product, and it's free. It's amazing. So, no, we, we rely on a lot of source.

It's free as in freedom, not just free as in beer, right? And that, that's really the important thing, right? I, you know, we were talking to, uh, the open tofu people a little while ago, right?

That's, that's real life, right? License changes things, companies decide to pull the rug a bit. And, but you have the option of four and go on, and you've got companies that came together there, so it's a great thing.

Um, thank God we don't have that at Argo and Intuit. Look, it's not like Intuit's a software vendor, right? That that's selling software.

Exactly. So we don't really worry as much about that, but there are, look, we had Octopus deploy here, right? If it's beyond them now to change that license or to, you know, they wanna pull out support, fine, others will pick it up.

Absolutely. And one of the things that, you know, one of the, Not that they are, I don't mean to that, not them. I'm not spreading rumors.

No, totally. And one of the things that we acknowledge is a challenge when adopting open source technologies and running it yourself is the fact that, you know, you have the overhead of being able to operate that yourself. So, you know, one of the things that Intuit really focuses on is when we introduce, you know, a new project or a new feature into the open source community, we wanna make sure that it's not only solving user problems and has a good user experience, but that we're also making sure that we can build technology that's gonna be sustainable for platform teams to be able to operate it internally as well.

Agreed. I agree. Beyond projects and CD itself, there were a few other pieces of Argo here that, uh, were refreshed.

What else? Yeah. Um, another thing that, I mean, Intuit is extremely involved in is Argo rollouts, which is a sub-project of Argo project focus on progressive delivery.

Um, Intuit reached a fantastic goal recently of, uh, a hundred percent of our top tier services, like with services that take the most traffic that are most important to our customers are all onboarded onto Argo rollouts and implement, uh, canary type deployments. Mm-hmm. And for those of you who aren't familiar with Canary deployments, it's stepwise deployments that allow you to send a percentage, uh, small percentages of your production traffic to new versions that are deployed out into production.

And we automate the analysis of the health metrics of our releases so that if we detected deterioration in those metrics, we can automatically roll it back for you and put you back into the stable state you once had getting a good experience for your end user customers while the development teams have time to troubleshoot what went wrong with my deployment, and they can fix it and continue their rollout moving forward. So that's something that Intuit has found great success in. Um, we have seen great improvements of our incident rate metrics and our recovery times.

Um, and it's something that we wanna make sure that we can continue to push forward in the community and look to make the flexibility of, uh, the types of metrics that can be used to power Argo rollouts and the type of traffic biters that are used in Argo rollouts in order to support the routing of the traffic so that this can be expanded in open source as well. Excellent. The fourth one, um, Argo events.

The, the maintainer of Argo Events is also an Intuit employee, but they've, uh, been focusing a lot recently on, on pra our Kubernetes native event streaming, um, platform, uh, that we're building, well, I shouldn't call it a platform. Uh, it's so lightweight, you could run it on a raspberry pie. So the team that brought you Argo is, is now working on more of an, an AIOps kind of, uh, lightweight solution that didn't really exist in Kubernetes.

So this is why we built things, because we need to use them and it just wasn't quite there yet in the community. Um, not to dis co flow or anything else that's out there, but we needed, I mean, 8,000 engineers who are building, you know, AI done for you experiences on our platform. Um, so we need the latest and greatest.

So, uh, a lot of that team is working on, on the PMA flow. PMA Pro project right now is Flow Bear that's represented on the show. You remember knew me.

You met him last time. I him the bear. Okay.

Speaking of the bear, this isn't a bear. This is, this is the Argo, uh, mascot and he, he's about to become an official part of, of Fian. Yes.

Yes, we are. He will be. Dude, you are sort of the Jane Goodall Goodall of, of Argo.

Uh, Wow. That's a compliment. I will take that.

I will take it. I'll take that. Yeah.

I, I, when I joined into it, I was one of my first questions to the Argo Marketing Sig, uh, when I joined in a meeting and I was like, why isn't Argo one of Fian friends? Yeah. And it's just that no one had really gotten around to, uh, But Lisa did it.

I asked the question, I think Michael CR submitted the poll request, but, um, yes, I will hopefully the next one of these you'll see Argo joining the buddies on there on 50 where he belongs. Exactly. Why is he missing out on the party?

I think he makes his own party, but that's a whole nother story. I mean, right. I think it's time to end this.

Um, ladies, thank you both so much. Seriously appreciate it. Yeah, I do.

And I also appreciate all you guys do for the community. It's a good thing. And thank you to Intuit for letting you do it.

Yes, yes. Thank you, Intuit. Yes.

Keep loving open source the way Open Source loves you. Appreciate That. Absolutely.

Alright, we're taking a break. We're here at Q Con, we've got yet more coming, so stay tuned.